Interview with Anamely Ramos

Interview with Anamely Ramos González (Camagüey, 1985), artist, human rights activist, and professor. Ramos graduated with a degree in art history (2007) and a masters in Cuban cultural processes (2014). She is currently a doctoral student in social anthropology at the Universidad Iberoamericana de México. 

Ramos was a professor of Cuban art and African art for 12 years at the Universidad de las Artes de Cuba (ISA), a role from which she was fired in 2019 for political reasons. She has also taught at the university-level in Luanda, Angola. For more than 10 years, she curated artistic projects in abandoned spaces in Havana and Camagüey. She has also curated exhibitions in Berlin, Buenos Aires, Luanda, New York, and Bogotá. She writes for "El estornudo" and other independent Cuban magazines and newspapers. 

She is the coordinator of the group Ánima, a creative and investigatory arts and memory collective in Cuba, as well as El parque horizontal, an initiative that gives visibility to independent Cuban civil society projects.  For five years, she led Fórum Loyola, a weekly debate forum on contemporary Cuban issues at the Centro Loyola in Havana that offered a space for theoretical debate on social issues and grassroots activism.

Ramos is a human rights defender and part of the San Isidro Movement for several years. She participated in the campaign against Decree 349 and in the campaign for the release of Luis Manuel Otero in March 2020. She was in the San Isidro barracks last November 2020, demanding the release of rapper Denis Solís. After July 11, she created a network to help prisoners and their families called "Donde tú caes yo te levanto," through which she helped more than 60 families for several months. From Mexico, and now from the United States, she continues participating in actions with different groups of Cubans in the diaspora and collaborating with various international organizations to make human rights violations in Cuba visible. In February 2022, she tried to return to the island twice and was not allowed to board the plane by orders of the Cuban State. She has resided in New York since 2022.